How to Fix a Unity Mobile Game Black Screen After an Interstitial Ad

An interstitial plays, the player taps close, and the game is just black. The ad paused your game and took over the surface, and the close callback never restored the normal state. Reset timescale and rendering in OnAdClosed to recover.

How to fix it

1. Restore state in OnAdClosed

In the ad-closed callback, set Time.timeScale = 1, restore AudioListener.pause = false, and resume any systems you paused before showing the ad.

2. Pause and resume symmetrically

Make sure every pause you apply when the ad opens has a matching resume on close; a missing unpause is the most common cause of the frozen black frame.

3. Force a frame

If the screen stays black after restoring state, request an explicit render or briefly toggle a fullscreen canvas to kick the engine into drawing the next frame.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Unity error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.